CVE-2024-35814 swiotlb: Fix double-allocation of slots due to broken alignment handling
A Linux kernel bug in SWIOTLB alignment handling causes double-allocation of memory slots, leading to buffer corruption and system hangs in virtual machines.
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Login needed
- Any signed-in user
- Attackable
- Local or same network only
- Victim action needed
- Not needed
- Fix
- Available
What is CVE-2024-35814?
CVE-2024-35814 is a high-severity memory corruption vulnerability in Linux kernel, published on 17 May 2024. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, with no action from the victim.
Official description
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
swiotlb: Fix double-allocation of slots due to broken alignment handling
Commit bbb73a103fbb ("swiotlb: fix a braino in the alignment check fix"), which was a fix for commit 0eee5ae10256 ("swiotlb: fix slot alignment checks"), causes a functional regression with vsock in a virtual machine using bouncing via a restricted DMA SWIOTLB pool.
When virtio allocates the virtqueues for the vsock device using dma_alloc_coherent(), the SWIOTLB search can return page-unaligned allocations if 'area->index' was left unaligned by a previous allocation from the buffer:
# Final address in brackets is the SWIOTLB address returned to the caller | virtio-pci 0000:00:07.0: orig_addr 0x0 alloc_size 0x2000, iotlb_align_mask 0x800 stride 0x2: got slot 1645-1649/7168 (0x98326800) | virtio-pci 0000:00:07.0: orig_addr 0x0 alloc_size 0x2000, iotlb_align_mask 0x800 stride 0x2: got slot 1649-1653/7168 (0x98328800) | virtio-pci 0000:00:07.0: orig_addr 0x0 alloc_size 0x2000, iotlb_align_mask 0x800 stride 0x2: got slot 1653-1657/7168 (0x9832a800)
This ends badly (typically buffer corruption and/or a hang) because swiotlb_alloc() is expecting a page-aligned allocation and so blindly returns a pointer to the 'struct page' corresponding to the allocation, therefore double-allocating the first half (2KiB slot) of the 4KiB page.
Fix the problem by treating the allocation alignment separately to any additional alignment requirements from the device, using the maximum of the two as the stride to search the buffer slots and taking care to ensure a minimum of page-alignment for buffers larger than a page.
This also resolves swiotlb allocation failures occuring due to the inclusion of ~PAGE_MASK in 'iotlb_align_mask' for large allocations and resulting in alignment requirements exceeding swiotlb_max_mapping_size().
Which versions are affected by CVE-2024-35814?
It affects 1 product.
Products include Linux kernel.
How do I fix CVE-2024-35814?
Apply the vendor's patch.
Upgrade to the fixed version. Memory-safe languages, compiler hardening and fuzzing prevent most new cases. More about Memory corruption.
Is CVE-2024-35814 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2024-35814 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Other vulnerabilities in Linux kernel
Sources
Also known as BELL-CVE-2024-35814, DEBIAN-CVE-2024-35814, GHSA-rqvp-j9p2-fcwx, UBUNTU-CVE-2024-35814.